Gloss effect is very popular weapon in the arsenal of web 2.0 designers. You can create it using any main stream app but I will show you how to do it in Adobe Illustrator CS3 (any version will do I guess except maybe some ancient one ) . This is I believe the easiest way yet and gloss effect can come handy for many things if you are Aston (or any other app) skinner. You can use it for instance for glossy balls like in Vista glossy orb start button, icons or whatever.  Ok launch your Illustrator and create any size basic rbg document (use rbg document for all that does not need to be printed on paper – that is the fastest explanation I can give). Size of the document or of the objects is not important since we are dealing with vectors here and we can always resize it at any time without any fear of quality loss.  In order to have something to apply gloss effect to I’ll show you by the way how to create nice blended object which is neat alternative for gradient fills and can lead to some pretty cool results.

Step1

Let’s quickly draw two circles by using the elipse tool, set the color of the larger circle to  darker color than the one inside and set the stroke to none.

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Short tutorial on my method for creating a faded smeary reflection using Photoshop CS3. Same method should work for earlier versions of Photoshop. This technique contrasts with “Apple-style” reflections, which are sharp and crisp, instead creating a short simple reflection that’s not as distracting.

This is part 2 of a 3-part series in which we’ll be generating a super-glossy shape, sticking a super-shiny dent in it, and then creating a luminous gem in the dent for a 3D UI feel. Part II demonstrates the creation of smooth dent on the surface of the glassy object using multiple shines, some layer-styles and a Gaussian blur filter. Tutorial requires Photoshop CS3 and makes generous use of layer-styles. (YouTube)

This is part 1 of a 3-part series in which we’ll be generating a super-glossy shape, sticking a super-shiny dent in it, and then creating a luminous gem in the dent for a 3D UI feel. Tutorial requires Photoshop CS3 and makes generous use of layer-styles. Be sure to click the link for watch in high quality (YouTube)

Generating images that tile easily by using Photoshop is a time-consuming process, no matter which method you use. Corel’s Painter X, although geared for traditional-media artists, contains a fantastic tile-making tool that could not be easier to use. Here’s how to do it.

Creating radial symmetry of rotated and aligned objects is a cinch in Photoshop, if you’re restricted to 90° angles. Illustrator’s the way to go for these kinds of things, but if you’ve just got Photoshop, here’s how you can mimic the effect easily. YouTube Video Tutorial.

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Ever since Aston 1.92 was released and 3pic format introduced many Aston themers seems to have problem with skinning taskbars applying them. I personally was thrilled with that feature and have been using it from the day one. What is the big issue with 3pics ? Before 3pic we could not mimic Windows XP (now Vista) taskbar like behavior. I said mimic and I stick to that more…

I had honor to interview frozzzen famous Aston skinner and designer. frozzzen influenced my work the most (still far far away from that quality ). There is no better way to start this web site than interviewing person who brought that much eyecandy to our screens Huge thanks to frozzzen for giving us some of his precious time.
(interview taken on 04.12.2007 over ICQ , PA=krstatzar)

PA: Hi frozzzen how are you?
frozzzen: a little tired, trying not to fell asleep:) more…

I have been thinking about this for quite a long but at the end with the huge help from Nick Egorov I managed to put PlanetAston on WordPress. After I had read a book on WordPress theming I decided to try to make one theme on my own by editing existing one. So I did and seems that it turned quite ok but it is still far from over. Although WordPress is quite easy to setup and to get start I couldn’t do it without Nick’s help on setting up the mysql database  but having some basic knowledge on html and css was really helpful in skinning WP. Skinning experiance was handy as well. more…